George Cowin's AS Media

Sunday, 25 April 2010

My website is a charity website made to help homeless dog, where people can adopt them or donate to our charity, so that we can look after them and give them happy lives.

So this makes our website very popular to all different age ranges, from young children to the elderly. So this will be great to distribute as this type of product can apply to anyone, and institutions will want this to be distributed well so that more people become aware of the site.

Distributing your website means to let it out it into the public. This can be done in many different ways, for example, the newspaper can be a very effective way of advertising a website as many people and families read the newspaper. Another way of doing this is by the radio, the radio can be fairly affective way of advertising as many people and families listen to the radio, whether it is in the car, at home or at work. Although, this may not be the best way to distribute the media product as people might not catch the name of the website via the radio.

Another way to distribute our media product is through the television, which is the most likely to be the best choice to use, as nearly everyone watches TV.

There is also the method of distributing the product through Internet banners, this is an advertisement made on well-known sites so that your website can have a link to it, so that it can be seen and used. For example, Google is a very popular website to advertise on, as many people search on this site daily, so the website will be seen and used more often.

All the different ways of distribution show that it will be quite simple to publicize our website as there are so many ways to do so.

This photo was taken of this dog at a farm where homeless dogs are held. The dog looks trapped as it is tied to a tree, this will make people feel sorry for the dog and want to help.

This puppy is small and cute, it is looking straight at the camera making the audience feel as if it is looking at them. The puppy eyes will attract our audience and make them feel sorry for the puppy.

This is my dog, I got her to sit down and look towards the camera, tilting her head. This makes her look cute and will attract dog lovers.

This is my dog again, she has her head and paws hanging through the banister, with her head tilting towards the camera. Her paw is reached out to the camera, giving the impression that she is reaching out to the audience wanting them to adopt her.

This is my dog when she was first born in the farm, her and the dog next to her are so small and look almost helpless. All children and adults will be attracted to this photo as almost every person loves cute, cuddly puppies.

This dog is also from the farm for homeless dogs. This dog looks lost and quite upset which will make people feel sorry for him and want to help towards the charity, or even to adopt him.

After giving out our survey, we discovered the range of people and ages that would be interested in our charity website. This is because all dog lovers can range from all different ages and gender. Therefore, we have aimed our website at a range of ages, our target audience is for children, families and the elderley.

We have used the colour scheme blue and green, this is to attract young children to our website. The blue and the green gives the impression of the outside and paints a picture of happiness, which attracts the young children and the elderly. We have also made the website very simple so that young children and the elderly can work their way around our website with ease.

The aim is to make it child friendly so children look at the dogs and then show their parents and persuade them to either adopt or donate to the charity. The audiences we aim to attract are dog lovers, families who want a dog and also elderly people who may want a companion.

We have also used drawings and scribbles that we scanned onto the website, which also attract children as it looks as if a child has drawn them, so therefore they can relate to it. We created our own font with letters that we drew ourselves, the font is a fun, curly font to attract our audience, making the website have a happy, fun mood to it.

The photos we have used of the dogs make the dogs look cute and loveable so that the audience want to help them, to either donate to the charity or even adopt one.

Thursday, 18 March 2010

A social group is shown in demographics for example, it is class, age, gender, ethnicity, disability and sexuality. We have used different aspects through out our site to reflect the type of people who we want to have interest in our site. We created a survey to help us clarify this; we gave the survey to a range of people of different social groups. One of the questions we asked was “Which of these newspapers do you read?”, with the return of all the surveys we found that 70% said that they read ‘The Sun Newspaper”, most of these people were aged from 20 to 40 years old. This shows that most of these people were working class and middle class people. Another of our questions was “How many children do you have?”, most of the working class and middle class people aged from 20 to 40 had children. This helped us to show the social groups we want to aim our website at, the survey showed we should aim the website at working and middle class people from 20 to 40 as these are the people that have families and want to adopt a dog to add to their family life.

We used the results from the survey to construct different aspects of our website to attract our target audiences attention. We realized that we had to make our website simple but also child friendly so that it stands out to the children and their families. For example, we have used a colour scheme of light blue and light green as these colours are simple and give the website a fun, happy mood. These colours attract children and also make the website seem simple.

The layout of our website is also very simple, to make it easy for the elder generation and also little children to use and to understand, for example, we have a simple navigation bar which show the different pages, it is placed horizontally at the top of the page, which is a typical convention used in many websites.

The style of language we have used is fairly simple to understand, we have also used rhetorical questions such as, “How can you help Paws 4 Thought?” this makes the user think about the question and become curious about the answer, so hopefully this will convince the user to donate to the website.

We have used many photographs through out our website of dogs and puppies. The dogs are almost always looking straight at the camera; this makes the user feel that the dog is looking at them in a sympathetic way. These pictures make families feel sorry for the dogs and make them want to help them by either donating to the charity or adopting one of them. We have got a photo of a dog with its paw hanging down and it looks very cute as it is looking at the camera with its head tilted. This picture will attract any dog lover, especially young children and make them want to help our charity.

When i started this media studies course, I thought that I was going to be learning about the way films, posters, newspapers and other things that are in the media are developed and created. My thoughts have changed slightly as now I know we are going into more depth about the media.

I think so far I have been successful in my small piece of written work and the story board we had to complete, I feel these were quite easy to do as I have already done media for GCSE and I have already learnt how to do them.

At the moment I haven't found anything I haven't understood although I would of like to spend more time on newspapers involved in the media, as I find this very interesting.

From watching the DVD on Casino Royale I have understood how complex the sound for movies is and how just little sounds that people would think nothing of have to be carefully recorded and put in the right place. I have also relised that the kind of music that is played in the films and TV help to create the different moods and atmospheres.

The film Gone Fishing was a short but interesting film, I think because it was so short and simple, it made the story line more effective.